"Hit The Road, Philosophy"

My latest article, written with John Kaag, at Times Higher Education.  Here's a sample:

"If philosophy is, as the name suggests, about loving wisdom, then it shouldn’t be something that is practised by only an erudite few. The argument that wisdom is valuable for everyone, and the life spent pursuing it is itself a good life is not some sort of Pollyanna idealism, but a pragmatic hope that philosophical reflection (what academic and novelist David Foster Wallace simply called “choosing what to think about”) can and does give life meaning."

You can read it all here.

"Don't Be Afraid To Hire Someone Better Than You."

My latest article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, about the best hiring advice I've ever received.

Minnesota Canvas

I just returned from teaching a monthlong tropical ecology class in Belize and Guatemala.  As I flew from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls, I saw this view of the farms below.  Farmers and engineers have made firm lines according to the compass points, dividing the land into neat checkerboard squares of farmland bordered by dirt roads.  Every section has its woodlot, a dark quadrilateral on a white snowdrifted landscape.  

Ignoring the lines laid down by us, the wind has painted over this right-angled landscape.  The snow and the soil show where the wind has steadily brushed across the state, patiently unmaking what we have done. 

The Place Where I Live - In Orion Magazine

Here is a short piece I wrote for Orion Magazine, along with a few of my photos from around Sioux Falls.  It will appear in the print edition later this year.

The Music of the Spheres: The Sun Is A Morning Star

Students in my Ancient and Medieval Philosophy class are required to spend at least four hours outdoors, gazing at the skies.   

The Morning Star, Good Earth State Park (SD), December 2013

That may sound odd, but it arises from my conviction that philosophy needs labs.  I call it my "Music of the Spheres" project, in which I invite them to consider what it would have been like to be Thales (who was one of the first to predict a solar eclipse), gazing at the night sky and thinking about the laws that seem to guide the motions of the celestial bodies. 

The students are given specific instructions and they must come up with a clear research project that can be accomplished using only the tools available to ancient astronomers. 

For me, the best part of the class comes at the end when I read their work, and I get to see their offhand comments, like this: 

"I saw the Milky Way and its Great Rift for the first time."

My heart leapt when I read that one.  This next one didn't make my heart leap, but it did make my heart glad, because it too is an important discovery:

"Stargazing is much more fun with a friend."

We live beneath these skies but so rarely do we lie on our backs beneath them and gaze upwards.  Rarely do we lift our eyes to the heavens to see what is there, and when we do, we are quick to turn away in boredom, as though it were a small thing to gaze into the greatest distances.

If you don't know what planets are visible right now; if you can't quickly identify a few constellations; or if you aren't sure what phase the moon is in, why not go outside and have a look?  And why not share the moment with a friend?

The heavens are not yet done revealing themselves to us, and "the sun is but a morning star."

Searching For Winter Strawberries

A late October strawberry in my garden

I spent my twentieth year of life in Madrid, Spain, studying Spanish philology.  Studying abroad is like laboratory work in a science class: the experience often teaches much more than lectures or readings could ever do.  Many of the lessons are unanticipated, and depend on the interaction of student and environment.

One day in February, for no particular reason, I wanted to eat strawberries.  A few blocks from my flat there was a market, so I walked there and searched for fruit stands.  Finding one but seeing that they had no strawberries, I asked the proprietor, "Do you know where I can find strawberries?"

"Of course," he replied. "Right here."

"But you don't have any," I observed.

"Of course I don't," he said.

I was confused.  "But you said I could find strawberries right here."

"You can," he replied.  "But not until June."

This took a little while to sink in.  I was accustomed to going to a supermarket at home in New York and buying any fruit I wanted at any time of year.  Now I was being told what should have been perfectly clear: fruit is seasonal.

At first I was disappointed, but it took only a few minutes before I realized that this wasn't such a bad thing.  It meant that the strawberries, when they arrived, would taste that much sweeter.  The disappointment of having to wait would be repaid by the delight when they did arrive.

The experience didn't reform me, of course.  I love eating my favorite foods year-round, despite not having harvested them and usually without knowing where they came from.

But it did make me appreciate some of the rhythms of life around me.  The first part of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, and most of Thoreau's Walden - two of my favorite books - follow the cycle of the seasons in the northern part of the United States.  Their understanding of nature is one that allows nature to undergo its habitual changes.  They might even say that what they know about nature arises from attention to just those changes.  Phenology, the attention to when and how things appear and disappear throughout seasons, is one of the most important parts of learning to see the world.  If I may speak an Emersonian word, phenology attunes us to the music nature wants us to hear.  To speak less mystically, it accustoms us to natural patterns, and much of what the naturalist wants is to learn those patterns so well that we can then see when nature departs from them.

What are the calendars in your life?  Technology has made many of them seem unnecessary, but I suspect that they give us much more than we know, just as my experience in Spain gave me unlooked-for lessons.  We should be careful not to insist that others delight in the absences or disciplines we delight in; what may be a delightful, self-imposed fast to us may be devastating to someone who is genuinely hungry. When we choose them for ourselves, school calendars, planning one's garden, the liturgical calendars and holidays of the world's religions - each of them can offer us rhythms of both discipline and delight as we make ourselves wait for the strawberries to ripen, the hummingbirds to return, the exams to end, the candles to be lit.

Walking In Nature - In Sioux Falls

Cardinal in Tuthill Park, Sioux Falls

Thoreau writes that not many people know the art of Walking.  I am trying to learn it, and I think part of it involves learning to see what is there.  My friend Scott Parsons has helped me to see better by teaching me to draw, since the pencil forces me to pay attention to what I actually see rather than just what I think I see.

Lately I have been trying to walk more - that is, to Walk more - in and around my city, Sioux Falls.  I find, as I step off the sidewalks and walk a little more transgressively, the city is transformed.  The habits of sidewalks and cars speed up the world around us until much of it vanishes in a blur.

Whitetail deer, east Sioux Falls

Thoreau recommends trans-gressing, that is, stepping across paths and fences rather than letting them herd us to the destinations that habit and tradition and fetishized commerce want to lead us.  Once he wrote that we should sometimes bend over and look at the world upside down.  Sometimes this is all the "transgression" that is needed to overcome the aggressive habits that constrain us in daily life.

Ice on a single blade of grass on the Augustana College campus

Another tool I have used lately is the camera, peering down its glassy pipe at single, simple things, trying to break up the landscape by gazing intently at just one point.  Or, at times, using the lens to draw the world together, to see how much I can gather into its frame.

When I first moved to Sioux Falls almost ten years ago I thought it was a homely place, a city that did not care for design or good planning or beautiful architecture.  Slowly, one frame at a time, I am changing my own mind.  As I Walk through and around it, I am coming to see that it is, at times and in places, quite a lovely place to live.

My Backyard Ark

Augustine once said that a key to his conversion was when he met St Ambrose.  Augustine had regarded the Bible as full of flawed and problematic texts.  As Augustine put it, "by taking them literally, I had found them to kill."(1)  Ambrose taught Augustine that the texts of the Bible may have more than one sense.  The scriptures might speak to him in more than one way.  When he heard this, and heard it from a man who thought it important to study science and the liberal arts, Augustine found his spiritual home in Christianity.


In recent years authors like Norman Wirzba, Bill McKibben, and Scott Russell Sanders have written about the relevance of Biblical texts for thinking about ecology.  To me, they have been a little like St Ambrose.  I've found one passage in Sanders to be quite helpful personally as I think about the management of my little suburban fifth-acre plot.

In his A Conservationist Manifesto, Sanders writes about the story of Noah and the Ark.  He remembers that Noah was given the task of saving not just himself but every other species as well.  And once they were on the ark, it was his job to care for the animals and to keep them alive.  Sanders talks about books, and communities, and practices that can be like small arks in our time.  One such "ark" may be the little plots of land we maintain around our homes:

"Every unsprayed garden and unkempt yard, every meadow, marsh, and woods may become a reservoir for biological possibilities, keeping alive creatures who bear in their genes millions of years; worth of evolutionary discoveries.  Every such refuge may also become a reservoir for spiritual possibilities, keeping alive our connection with the land, reminding us of our origins in the green world."(2)

Lately I've been surveying my yard more closely, looking to see whom I'm sharing it with, and how.  I've been trying to do some phenology, like Thoreau did.  I also wander my garden with lenses: a hand lens for close inspection; my phone camera and my SLR for keeping records of what lives and grows there; and I've recently set up an infrared game camera to see who passes through at night.  For the curious, I've posted some photos below of what I've seen there.

*****
(1) Augustine, Confessions.  Henry Chadwick's translation. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 88.
(2) Scott Russell Sanders, A Conservationist Manifesto. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009) p. 16.

*****

All of these images were taken by David O'Hara in the fall of 2013.  You may use them elsewhere but please mention where you found them and give credit where it is due. Thanks.